1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of network communications. More specifically, the present invention relates to extending the information provided to a Server Load Balancer via a dynamic feedback protocol in order to provide more efficient load balancing.
2. The Background
Server load balancing devices (SLBs) are commonly used in computer networks to distribute a load among multiple servers. The Dynamic Feedback Protocol (DFP) was created to permit monitoring of the individual servers' loads and communication of the current loads to the SLB so that the SLB could evenly distribute a load among the multiple servers.
In DFP, a vector is created by each server, the vector containing the current total server load. This vector is then communicated via the semi-secure DFP to the SLB. Thus, under high traffic conditions, an SLB can remove busy servers from the pool of available servers.
One major drawback, however, of this system is that it limits the SLB to performing rather simplistic load balancing. By communicating only the total server load to the SLB, the SLB really only has three choices as to how to handle a busy server: it can stop sending it traffic entirely, it can (more drastically) send all traffic back to its origin until the server is freed up, or it can reduce the overall load sent to the server.
What is needed is a solution which permits an SLB to perform more complex, and more efficient, load balancing than was available in the prior art.